Slaying Dragons One Note at a Time

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to stumbled across an artist that I could not have imagined would find a spot on my radar. In all honesty, I’m fairly shocked. It all began innocently enough on a perfectly average Wednesday evening while searching for something interesting to watch, where I soon found myself evaluating possibilities on the Documentary channel. One show that quickly caught my attention was titled “Speaking in Strings”, which centered on an Italian violinist named Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Now normally I would have little interest in a show about a classical musician, but an intuition rose up to remind me of another time when I stumbled across a random PBS show featuring Yo Yo Ma, which had a striking impact on me, so I watched the trailer in order to get a taste – and found myself surprisingly intrigued.

The first thing that stood out was that she had an exuberant personality, enough so that she had appeared on Johnny Carlson’s “The Late Show” a number of times (watch the full clip to catch her humor), and that would not have occurred unless the producers felt that she could hold her own with a comedian in front of a live audience. She also had a segment of “60 Minutes” dedicated to her, as well as an appearance on “Sesame Street”, a high cultural watermark, so clearly she had something of interest for people outside of the classical music milieu. But the trailer also hinted in a few scenes that suggested trouble, such as a gun being flashed on screen, which is not plot device that I would normally associate with a classical musician. That was enough for me. My interest was piqued, so I sat back and took in her story.

Now before proceeding any further, allow me to prepare the groundwork for the actual theme of this essay, because this is a critical part of my endeavor here. For the setup, I need to bring up Joseph Campbell, as I often do, because he introduced me to the world of mythology when I first heard his incredible series of interviews with Bill Moyer shortly before his death in 1987. Those interviews ended up being packaged as “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” and introduced him to millions around the country, which I proudly count myself. But to be more on point here, it was his digression on “the Hero’s Adventure” that caught my attention, particularly in regards to its psychological underpinnings. And that is the target I want to center on.

To quickly clarify his point, it’s Campbell’s understanding that many Hero adventures project the hero’s frailties outward, where they become manifested into the storyline, perhaps it’s our selfishness, jealousies, ambitions, or hubris, and is typically represented as a dragon or demon of some kind. The demon therefore represents a threat to our equilibrium and balance by its intention to consume us, thus we have to confront and defeat the demon in order to save or restore a proper balance to our lives . It can be an individual threat aimed at ourselves or to our community as a whole. Ancient cultures were chocked full of these mythic tales and were used as effective teaching tools. 

One popular story that still has currency today and is relevant to my point here, is that of Achilles, who was the Greeks’ finest warrior during the Trojan War. His mother, the nymph Thetis, had dipped him in the River Styx to make him invulnerable in battle—except for his heel, where she gripped the baby. During the Trojan War, Achilles achieved fame by slaying Hector outside the city gates, but he didn’t have much time to savor his conquest. Achilles died later in battle when an arrow shot by the Trojan prince Paris, guided by the gods, struck the one vulnerable spot on his body: his heel. To this very day, we refer to someone’s emotional or psychological weakness as their “Achilles Heel.” Flag that.

But regardless of the imagery one may wish to frame it by, the challenge must be faced and the battle fought before we can transcend it – and I believe it’s in that recognition that we can all bow a knee in reverence to the courage at play, because we will all eventually find ourselves at a critical threshold in our lives that will demand the very best in us; a threshold that Nadja is about to face.

In one poignant example of the personal courage involved, I recall watching a television show a few years ago in which a high school drama teacher was staging a Shakespearian play and had convinced a young African American boy to play the lead. Through all the rehearsals he displayed a true gift for acting, and appeared to have found a professional calling, but when the play was scheduled to begin on opening night, he went missing and no one knew where he was. Well, the drama teacher had a suspicion where to look and indeed found him in her classroom, hiding under her desk. At this sensitive moment in the young man’s life, the teacher handled it with sublime care by stating this one poignant sentence, then left him alone to contemplate it.

“a warrior who walks away from the battle will die a thousand deaths from his failure to respond. But a warrior who confronts his fear and joins the battle can only die once.”

Now, with that setup in place, I want to lay out the point to all of this. Remember that when I first watched the documentary, it was solely as a curiosity, yet by its conclusion I was completely enthralled. It began simply enough by showing that as a teenager, Nadja had become the youngest person ever to win the prestigious  Walter W. Naumburg International Violin Competition (20). Then as the show progressed and she grew into a renowned world-class musician, it pivoted to address her struggles with depression, and it was while going through a particularly rough period that she attempted suicide. As she described it, she had locked herself in her bathroom, put a gun to her head……. and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. And it was in that momentary reprieve that she talked herself off the ledge and got professional help. Then a curious thing happened, only a few days later while contemplating what could have been, she described hearing a piece of music that bowled her over and quickly became obsessed and wanted to learn it immediately.

The composition that she heard is titled “Tzigane”, by French composer, Maurice Ravel. Now I’ve already admitted to knowing next to nothing of classical music, but I do have an ear and can easily decipher how unique the composition is. The name, “Tzigane” was a common way to refer to Hungarian gypsies during Ravel’s time, and the composition reflects their exotic lifestyle with an eclectic and free flowing structure. The flow is rhapsodic and contains a range of contrasting moods, yet still feels surprisingly spontaneous and natural. It’s easy to imagine why an Italian from New Jersey, who strikes me as having a gypsy’s temperament herself, would be drawn to it, but the drawback for a soloist is that it presents technical challenges of the highest order, even for a virtuosos like herself. It also demands an emotional commitment that should have been off-limits for someone in such a fragile place.  For instance, the mood of the composition swings wildly, and at one-point becomes intensely dark and ominous, almost Machiavellian in its reach. 

When Nadja approached her teacher for help navigating the many challenges it represented, she refused, insisting to Nadja that wasn’t ready for anything nearly that daunting. Well, being a passionate Italian could mean only one thing; she taught herself.

Now in order to frame her teachers concerns with more clarity – and weight, I recall a memorable scene from the movie “Shine”, a film based on the life of Pianist, David Helfgott and brilliantly played by Geoffrey Rush. In the critical scene, a teenaged David played a concert and chose a seriously difficult piece of music known as “Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3”, largely to earn the respect of his demanding father (from what I’ve read, his father’s portrayal was largely a plot device created solely for the movie). At the end of the composition, after being fully invested in the emotional intensity of the music, Helfgott suffered a mental collapse – and he never fully came back. The film artfully depicted the emotional price that Rachmaninoff’s composition exacted on him and suggested that it took him to an interior room that his mind was not prepared to enter. In other words, he unknowingly found himself face-to-face with his Demon and was not prepared for the encounter. The scene provides a striking parallel to Nadja’s own vulnerability.  

I hope the proper groundwork has been established here, because just two weeks after that fateful misfire, she did the unthinkable – she played “Tzigane” to a packed house at Carnegie Hall.

But again, allow me to circle back to Campbell’s theme once more, because the critical moment for the hero comes when confronting their demon with the understanding they could be damaged, or even destroyed by the encounter. As suggested earlier, the Demon simply represents the Hero’s shadow self, which is a private sphere, and in this case pointed to Nadja’s struggle with depression and her self-worth.

In light of that setup, there stood Nadja, in front of the orchestra in Carnegie Hall, with violin in hand, trying to gather all her strength before committing. It was an anxious moment; the audience was silent, the orchestra was silent, and there she stood, gathering all of her focus and strength for the coming battle. This was not an entertainer preparing to “phone in” a performance, but rather a young women struggling, but ready to face her demon nonetheless.

The documentary only presented the last few seconds of the concert, but it indeed captured the crucial moment.. At that point, with the music driving at the height of its intensity, Nadja commented in a voice-over that:

“the music was reaching the point where a battle was about to take place, a battle that I knew was my battle.”

So clearly she understood the plot before ever walking on the stage.

In attempting to finish this essay, which has sat unfinished for nearly eighteen years, I was able to locate a write up of this very performance from a music critic at the time, which described her performance this way.

“That Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg exulted in the virtuosic fireworks of Ravel’s “Tzigane” at Carnegie Hall on Monday night was really no surprise. The kinetic violinist with her take-no-prisoners temperament was well suited to Ravel’s frenzied evocation of Hungarian gypsy music……. When the performance reached its self-immolating conclusion, Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg triumphantly twirled her violin in her hand like a rocker spinning an electric guitar.”

That excerpt certainly makes it sound triumphant, and perhaps it was for the audience, but for Nadja, there was a different subplot at play, which was clearly evident from her expressions it its conclusion. With the emotional release of hitting that final note, with the battle finished, she did something that truly surprised me; standing there with Carnegie Hall giving her a standing ovation, she displayed absolute humility. It was as if she intuitively understood that her demon was up to the challenge, and that any sense of victory was entirely provisional. In that brief three seconds of video, my mind was blown, not only because I saw Campbell’s Hero theme play out right in front of me, but also that Nadja understood the uncomfortable ‘balance of power’ that she had to work with, and appeared to accept that this demon would be fought again.

We are so conditioned in our culture to concede to the victorious their right to boast and pound their chests within the emotional exuberance of a hard-fought victory, but that was not what I watched. What I witnessed was that of a wounded warrior, with weapon in hand, standing there with soul bruised and bloodied from a crippling battle, but still standing just the same. After she gathered herself, with the crowd still applauding, she just stood there, motionless, staring out with a battle-weary expression and simply nodded in appreciation.

It was an incredible piece of human drama to watch.